


breath off of water

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 7x05 tag, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Non-Linear Narrative, Season 7 Spoilers, Season/Series 07, she might be losing it, team very worried for jemma simmons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 09:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24967546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: She blinks suddenly, static running through her vision, and she has to shake off the shudder running through her spine.She doesn’t know how long she’s been alone.
Relationships: Deke Shaw & Jemma Simmons, Enoch & Jemma Simmons, Jemma Simmons & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 11
Kudos: 56





	breath off of water

**Author's Note:**

> What's real? I don't know.

Her fingers stop on the keyboard, mid though, mid _word_ , and she can’t remember what she was typing or why. 

Deke chatters her ear off while he works, like she does sometimes with Fitz, or did, more often when they were younger, before it felt like they could read each other’s minds and before there were any secrets to come between them. _Deke,_ her grandson, her and Fitz’s daughter’s child, talks like he doesn’t expect her to listen and that too is familiar. No one seems to think their grandson is anything like them, but Jemma can see the similarities in the little things. 

He pauses to take a breath and she tells him to be careful with the compressor, softly, not to dismiss but with concern, for him, not the instruments. Out of the corner of her eye she catches him turning towards her, sees the surprise in his eyes and the lopsided smile that blooms on his face. It pains her heart when he looks like that, and she wonders how little of his life he had someone to genuinely care for him. 

She reassures him with a smile of her own and he goes back to work, but she keeps watching. Sometimes when she looks at him she feels so inexplicably like her gran. She thinks of running around the garden in her family home, of quick glances over her shoulder at her gran sitting on the patio to make sure she still had her attention and she knows that the expression she wears now is the same one Gran gave to her then. It’s contentment, and love, and a reassurance that everything has worked out all right. It’s strange to her that she can feel those things, does feel those things, having taken a short cut to the end. She’s only lived the beginning, and so much of the middle is still a mystery, full of strife and chaos. Yet she looks at him, hunched over his workspace with the same curve in his back as her husband has, and she can’t help but feeling content. 

After a moment she returns to the screen before her, reads her sentence back again, finds the train of thought she was following or at least one similar, and continues her work. Deke continues rambling about calculations and the Zephyr and 1950’s fashion. 

It’s nice to have company in the lab again. He’s not Fitz, obviously, but he’s as close as she can get and it’s reassuring to see her husband in the way his brow furrows when he’s thinking, how he swears under his breath when something isn’t working. 

She blinks suddenly, static running through her vision, and she has to shake off the shudder running through her spine. 

She doesn’t know how long she’s been alone.

Fitz leans over the tabletop, two hands planted on the surface, his head bowed between them, and his shoulders hunched. She can see his breath in his back, lungs expanding and contracting his ribs and muscles and tissues, moving his skin and his shirt. They’re both quiet for a long time, neither wanting to fall back into the arguments only running them in circles. 

“We don’t have a choice, Jemma.” His voice cracks on her name and it shatters everything that’s left of her heart. 

She takes the two steps across the lab to him, lays a hand on his shoulder, and feels the hitch of his breath where he’s fighting off tears. “Okay,” she says a tear dropping down her own cheek that she hadn’t even felt brewing. “Okay.”

She finds Daisy sitting on the Zephyr floor on one of the lower levels, her back curved along the slope of the plane wall. Her shoulders are hunched, curled around herself protectively and she’s looking at something on her phone. Jemma pauses in the hallway, unsure whether to disturb her or not, unsure of whether she wants any company, and altogether not sure where they stand. It feels like a lifetime since they’ve had the time for a real conversation. 

“I can hear you breathing, Jemma.” Daisy says softly, just loud enough for the sound to bounce off metal walls and get to Simmons. Daisy looks up, smiles, soft and sad, and pats the space of the floor next to her, an invitation. 

Simmons folds herself down to the floor next to her, staring at the metal pipes in the metal walls instead of her friend. “Are you all right?”

Daisy sighs and her shoulders shrug then bump into Jemma’s. “I feel like I should be asking you that.”

“I’m fine,” she answers automatically, but she doesn’t know how true that is, doesn’t even know how she would determine whether she was fine or not. 

“Yeah, me too,” Daisy says, and it sounds like she knows all the things that Jemma herself can’t figure out. 

“Then what are you doing down here?”

She laughs and it’s such a good sound, it’s a cool breeze wafting through the window on a stifling hot day. “Deke was getting a bit much, he keeps asking me history questions.”

Simmons finds she can laugh too. “But the wrong ones,” she finishes, and Daisy nods along. 

“He’s so _weird,"_ she chuckles, then turns almost wistful, “Your grandson.”

Jemma feels the same. “He’s one of a kind.” 

The headaches get worse the longer they keep hopping through time. They start as a light pressure in her temples she hardly notices until she’s tired after a long day and she finds she has to squint to read off her work screen. Enoch tells her it’s nothing to worry about. A side effect of pressure changes and synthetic lights and recycled air. 

It takes a week for them to creep backward, until there’s a thick band of pain wrapping around her skull and by that point he’s already gone, left behind in the past. She ignores it as best as she can, pushes it out of her mind as she’s working and tries to sleep it off when she isn’t. 

They crawl down the back of her head and into her neck and there’s nothing she can do but pull at the muscles and find no relief. 

There’s a baby in her arms. Sweat clings to her, old and new, her hair is matted, sticking to her neck, the knot she tied it into sags. Tremors run through her body and she tries to keep them inside, tries not to disturb the baby who’s not yet asleep. Every one of her muscles ache, feel weak and drained. Exhaustion rushes through her body but with it comes pure happiness, and they feel disconnected. She feels a bit like she’s floating outside herself. 

Fitz has one hand under hers, cradling the baby’s head because she doesn’t quite trust her strength. The smooth metal of his wedding ring and the callouses on his hands help her hold their child strong. She wants to look at him, to see the adoration he gives their daughter or to ask what’s going on, but she can’t seem to leave the deep well of the baby’s eyes, clear dark blue water that drowns her happily.

She wakes with a start, feeling like she’s falling, feeling like she’s dropped something, but she can’t remember what. 

They’ve jumped again. They’ve jumped and the moving parts of the Zephyr clatter and the team clamber over each other trying to figure out where and when they are. Simmons stands at the controls, watching the screen that she can’t affect. 

She looks to the floor even though she didn’t hear anything drop, doesn’t think there was anything in her hand to begin with to lose, but she looks at the floor, her body coils, ready to reach down and grab something that isn’t there. Something’s slipped through her fingers. She dug her grip into wet sand on the beach, pulled free a handful of it, only for a wave to crash over her, dragging what she’s grasped out through cracks in her fingers and back to the sea, even though her grip doesn’t wane. 

There’s something she’s supposed to tell Enoch, but Enoch isn’t here. Or he is here, presumably, taking the long way around, still in New York, still at the bar. But because he’s there she can’t talk freely with him. The technology they’ve been forced into is primitive; in this time, it hasn’t even occurred to anyone yet to make it secure. 

But there is something she’s supposed to tell him, or he’s supposed to tell her. Her headache spikes into the top knot of her spine, really the bottom cervical vertebrae, C7 juts the furthest out through the skin. She rubs at it but it doesn’t help, it never helps. If only she could talk to Enoch-

As soon as she has the thought, it’s gone. The absence hardly even lingers. Sand rushing back to the shore. 

In moments of silence, when she waits for a computer to load, when the others are talking without her, she goes over rote facts. Her times tables, atomic numbers of the periodic table, formulas. Things she knows, backwards and forwards, over and over. 

_E = mc2, F = ma, S = d/t,_ and on and on and on.

She remembers when she hated math. Before she found the beauty in it, before she found she could cling to constants and the harsh rules of variables, before she found she could take the chaos of her thoughts and stack them into equations. 

Back in year one and two, before she started jumping through grades like they’re jumping through time, she found it boring and unnecessary. _Who needs to learn to count?_ she remembers asking her dad. Of course 2+2=4, she could see it, in the objects around her and in the numbers on the page, just like she could look at a word she’d never seen before, never heard before, and understand it within the context of the sentence, define it by the function of its etymology. 

Once it got interesting though she couldn’t get enough. Once she realized that explanations for the whole world were bundled into neat little packages of letters and numbers that she could learn to define and extrapolate from, she could hardly be torn away from her books for bedtime. 

She still knows her times tables, can explain biomolecules to the detail of her PhD, then again in layman’s terms. Every year of her schooling is still there, all the building blocks of her knowledge and the things she’s learned since she left Uni. She checks in on it all, quizzes herself on the details as she performs tasks that have become mundane, explains it as if to herself as a child, and she finds nothing missing. 

It’s something else she might have forgotten.

Enoch has her hooked up to an EEG and an EKG and three other things she’s not sure she’s ever seen before. He’s asking her questions. She answers them like they’re basic, beyond simple, her date of birth and her middle name, but they’re not. She can’t hear what he’s asking her but she knows that they’re not. 

They’re alone on the Zephyr, Fitz gone, the team still waiting in the past. Those are facts she knows. Everything else, is a question. But she can’t ask them, finds herself only able to speak words that feel as if they’re coming from a different side of her brain. It’s like she memorized these words while she was asleep, and now she can only remember them one after the other after the other. If she doesn’t say the previous word, she’ll forget the next. Once she says the next word, she forgets the previous. 

She watches her own brain waves and isn’t quite sure where they’re coming from. 

Sousa is yelling at her and Deke is yelling back for her. She wants to tell them both to be quiet, to snap out of it because there’s work to be done and yelling about what they don’t know isn’t going to get them anywhere, and because the throbbing of her head is exacerbated by the noise. But she can’t, because the throbbing of her head is exacerbated by the noise and she finds she can’t quite hear them. 

She’s fogged in, feels lost on the moors like the little girl in the story her dad would read to her at bedtime when she was small. The girl trying and trying to find her way home despite a world of grey on grey. It made her so anxious, she would curl her knees in to her chest as her dad read, heart racing for the end when the girl could see house lights through the clouds around her, but she asked for it every night, choosing it over sunnier tales of chattering animals and princesses. 

She thinks she’s supposed to know what they’re talking about. She thinks she is, she’s not sure anymore. 

Things are supposed to be in her control. That’s what the math is for, the science, she knows that, she should be able to explain it but she can’t. This is a test, she has all the information, but she doesn’t know what formula to use to make sense of it, to find the answer they sorely need. 

Silence falls and she feels almost faint, like the world could slip out from under her at any moment. She takes a breath, blinks hard to clear her vision, and steadies herself on the edge of the counter. There’s still work to be done, she doesn’t know much but she knows that. 

She’s sleeping, for once, peacefully for once. There’s a weight in the bed next to her, the familiar curl of Fitz’s arm around her waist. Her hand’s gone numb from how heavy her body is, from the density of her unconsciousness, but she doesn’t mind, she can’t really feel it. 

The room around her moves, changes, starts as her bunk on the Zephyr, then in the Lighthouse, then the Playground. The nightlight from her childhood bedroom flickers in the corner and sunlight filters through the trees of an ever expanding forest. 

The sheets are cool against her skin, none of the stifling heat trapped beneath the covers that Fitz’s body always brings. She curls up tight, not quite cold but not reaching to stretch a limb out from under the cascading heat of the blankets like usual. 

A soft cry wakes her, just the start of discontent, as she falls deeper into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm very worried about Simmons... very very worried. but the point of this fic is to call into question everything we (or she) think we know. I don't know if it actually worked but please let me know what you thought in comments or if you want to yell at me on tumblr i'm @sinkingsidewalks


End file.
